Iets lekkers met een bite!

Oh, what a happy birthday I had last time. One of the many awesome gifts I received, was the first cook book that stemmed from BBC’s The Great British Bake Off — which just so happens to be one of my favorite tv shows. I can not even begin to explain why this book is so great and how many amazing recipes it contains. However, here’s a little peek of the chocolate crinkles, a cookie I had never had before. It slightly resembles the more crunchy corners of a brownie, and can be considered the love child of a brownie & cookie.

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Oatmeal cookies may be just as famous as the legendary chocolate chip, but they’re not in the Netherlands. We use oatmeal to make porridge, and that’s about it. That is why I wanted to try a little baking with oatmeal myself, and naturally I started with cookies. Like I wrote in one of my previous posts, I am almost religiously in favor of crunchy cookies: This led me to this recipe on SmittenKitchen, a deliciously inspiring baking blog. I made some minor changes, converted the volume amounts to SI units and tried & tested a few variations. I hope you like them, and that you will share your own variations in the comments below!

Ingredients:

– 1 cup / 128 g all-purpose flour

– 1 teaspoon baking powder

– 1/4 teaspoon salt

– 1 3/4 sticks / 200 g butter (slightly softened)

– 1 cup / 200 g sugar

– 1/4 cup packed / 50 g light brown sugar

– 1 large egg

– 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

– 2 1/2 cups / 225 g old-fashioned rolled oats

– 6 ounces / 170 g white chocolate, chopped

– + 1/2 cup / 70 g hazelnuts

You can play around with the addition of chocolate and nuts. I have tried these two varieties and my friends and family loved them.

Variety 1:

1/2 cup / 75 g white chocolate

+ 1/2 cup / 70 g toasted hazelnuts

+ 70 g ‘kandijsuiker’ : These are very crunchy sugar crystals, I’m not sure about a non-Dutch equivalent… Basically, you could use anything sweet and crunchy

Variety 2:

1/2 cup / 70 g toasted almonds

+ 1/4 cup / 70 g peanut butter

+ 50 g ‘kandijsuiker’

These amounts will yield about 24 portions (2 tablespoons of dough each). Bake them at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celcius for 13-16 minutes.

In January, my all-time love and I finally got married. After being over ten years together, we knew what kind of cake we wanted even before we started planning the wedding: Chocolate + chocolate and nothing frivolous, airy, fruity or flower-y. As much as I would have loved baking such a cake myself, I decided this wouldn’t be a project I’d want to take on the days before my own wedding (thank you, past-me). Some of my best-baking friends and family got the scare of the year when I asked them if they’d want to bake one of our wedding cakes. It took a lot of convincing and a very detailed, tried & tested recipe, but in the end they could not have done a better job (we’re forever thankful). So now, I would like to share this recipe, which has a special place in my heart, with all of you, the readers of my blog. I hope it may bring you as much joy as it did us!

This epic chocolate cake consists of three kind of muffin-like, fudgy cake layers, with a chocolate fudge cream in between (‘ganache’).

Ingredients for the cake:

– 300 ml water

– 90 g Dutch cocoa powder

– 250 g flour

– 476 g sugar

– 1 tsp salt

– 2 sachets of baking powder (=2 x 16 g)

– 3 sachets of vanilla-flavored sugar (=24 g)

– 350 ml buttermilk

– 130 g vegetable oil (peanut of sunflower)

– 3 free-range eggs

Ingredients for the ganache:

– 250 g (extra) dark chocolate

– 75 g butter

– 250 ml cream

Method:

One day/a couple of hours ahead: Cook 300 ml of water, dissolve the cocoa in the boiling water and leave to cool.

Mix together the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and vanilla-flavored sugar (if you don’t have vanilla-flavored sugar, just use 500 g sugar instead of 476 and add some fresh vanilla of vanilla flavoring). Next, add the buttermilk, oil and eggs and stir until you get a smooth batter. Then, add the water-cocoa solution, and let the batter rest for about 1 hour. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius.

I highly recommend you either use three baking pans or take turns in the oven to get three cake layers, because this cake is next to impossible to cut into three layers. Grease the baking pan (24 cm diameter), put some baking paper on the bottom and poor in 1/3 of the batter (which will approximately weigh 595 g). Bake the cakes for about 50 minutes and leave to cool on a wire rack.

To make the ganache, slowly melt the chocolate and butter. Let this cool for a little while, and then stir in the cream. You can now let this mixture cool until it has the consistency you like to work with. Smear the ganache on two of the cake circles, stack them up, add the third cake circle, and smear the rest of the ganache all over the resulting layered cake.

To enable easy cutting of the cake, it’s best when it is a bit cooled, but not too cold, because the ganache because difficult to work with – and it doesn’t taste nearly as good as it does at room temperature.

When I visited the U.K. last year, my colleagues at the University of Bristol had just planned a bake sale. Everyone would bake something at home, and everyone was buying stuff off each other (for themselves, or kids, neighbors, grandparents etc) with all the proceedings going to a good cause that the organizing team picked (the organization alternated). I loved it so much, I am still determined to introduce bake sales in the work place back here in the Netherlands. One of the guys had made millionaires’ shortbread, which is basically the same as chocolate caramel shortbread, but that doesn’t sound nearly as magnificent. He used a recipe from Waitrose, which is an upmarket chain of British supermarkets.

If you’re not baking for any sale, make sure you could stand to gain a few pounds, because millionaires’ shortbread will make you want to eat the whole batch and gain a million.

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Last year I took my first trip to the US, to California to be precise. There was one thing on top of my tourist-wish list: Visiting the Cheesecake Factory. The menu totally threw me off! Back here in the Netherlands, generally, we’re only familiar with the basic New York cheesecake, so I had a very very hard time choosing which cheesecake to try. Needless to say, I went for the Oreo cheesecake, and until this day I cannot get the mind-blowing taste out of my head. It honestly was one of the best pieces of cake I have ever tasted.

It took me a few tries, but I think this recipe approaches the sublime original, without being too hard to make yourself.

Ingredients:

– 2 packs of Oreos (2x 176 grams, or 32 cookies)

– 70 g butter, melted

– 250 g mascarpone

– 200 g crème fraîche

– 200 g cream cheese

– 200 g powdered sugar

– 4 eggs, yolks and whites separated

– 2 tbsp corn starch [or ‘maizena’ in Dutch]

– two vanilla pods (or 2 tsp of essence)

Method:

Crush half of the Oreos, including the cream in the middle, (1 pack = 4×4 cookies = 176 grams) and mix the crumbs with 70 grams of melted unsalted butter. Press them in a springform pan lined with baking paper, and let the crust harden in the fridge while you start making your filling. You could of course use more cookies, for a thicker deliciously dark crust.

This cheesecake filling can be used to make one regular-sized cake (22-24 cm diameter) or you could make party bites: this filling is enough for 45 small ones (in a muffin/cupcake tin).

Mix the egg whites until stiff. In a separate bowl, mix together the cheeses, sugar, egg yolks, corn starch and vanilla. Make sure the mixture turns out smooth. Then gently fold in the stiff egg whites, and transfer it into the crust. Next, you can break some Oreos into large chunks and spread these over the cheesecake mixture – don’t worry, they’re meant to kind of sink in. Now bake the cheesecake for 1.5 hours at 150°C (or 25 minutes at 160°C if you’re making small ones). After baking, the cake may not look too firm, but know that it will set when cooled. Leave the cheesecake in the oven after baking for about two hours so it cools slowly. Then move it to the fridge for at least another two hours. Finish the cake of with some powdered sugar and Oreos on top.

Red velvet has intrigued me for a couple of years now. In the Netherlands, there is no such thing, so I had no idea it was ‘just’ chocolate! Thanks to a Betty Crocker mix, and a little help from my friend Wikipedia, I figured out how to make a red velvet cake from scratch. I am not sure whether it had the authentic taste, but it tasted good nonetheless.

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I am starting to get kind of repetitive in my posts, but again, this one is not hard to make: a chocolate mousse torte/pie or whatever you want to call it. I’d like to call it: an awesome dessert!

All it took was a store-bought Oreo pie crust, one layer of cream cheese+vanilla+fine sugar and one layer of chocolate mousse (dark chocolate+whipped cream+gelatin), and a couple of hours of setting in the fridge.

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Here in The Netherlands, there’s not an awful lot of variation going when it comes to peanut butter. We have your regular peanut butter sandwich, and we use peanut butter to make an Indonesian peanut (sateh) sauce. That’s about it.

Just thinking about combining peanut butter with sweets like, say, chocolate, makes many shiver — even though they are familiar with Snickers candy bars. But I’m always willing to try new stuff, so when Pinterest inspired me to bake these cookies, I was pretty happy with the result. As you can see in the second picture (in the back), the first batch was thicker than the second, which resulted in a American-style chewy cookie. The second, thinner batch packed more crunch, which I personally prefer.

Ingredients:

133 g flour

1 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

96 g butter

210 g peanut butter

144 g granulated sugar

85 g light brown sugar

1 egg

1 tsp milk

vanilla extract/a vanilla pod

75 g chocolate chips (optional)

Bake these babies at 175 degrees Celsius for 10-12 minutes. I baked them in a cupcake/muffin pan so they would get that perfect round shape.

NOTHING beats chocolate! To me, the ultimate treat is sweet and contains chocolate in some shape or form. These days, cupcakes are all the rage. That’s probably got something to do with the easy preparation -anyone can do it-, ingredients – anyone can get it- and ready to eat serving portions -everywhere can these be served, no plates or cutlery neccessary-.

So here’s hoping this recipe for chocolate cupcakes will inspire you to get baking — from scratch! Yesterday I once again checked the package of one of those cupcake mixes offered in every store now: It really is nothing but self-raising flour and sugar. Please don’t waste your money on those, try this recipe instead!

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Just a quick showoff post today y’all: It’s a sachertorte, a.k.a. a traditional chocolate layer cake that originated in Vienna, Austria. I made this one for my mom’s birthday. I love you mom, you’re the best!